Today was a strange day. I spent most of my time acting like it was just another day off.

But interspersed in these relatively mild periods were pockets of total rage. But not rage against the decision to lay me off. Rage against how certain factions of the company suddenly turned around and started treating me like a criminal. Last night I tried to log into my (ex)work email, and it was closed already.

Now that might be a fine policy but…it isn’t the policy of my former employer. I know for a fact that some people are let go and allowed to use their work-provided laptops and emails for a few weeks to allow them to notify contacts and so forth. Not so me. So that really irks me. That says to me “This person isn’t trustworthy so we’d better cut him off immediately.”

Second, I keep dwelling on the GM and how she didn’t so much as say goodbye to me. In fact, I fear I’m obsessing over this fact. I’m not going to claim we were best friends, but we’d had some common outside-of-work interests and have had many happy conversations about these things. I’d lent her DVDs and things like that. But no goodbye from her, and certainly no offer of a letter of recommendation or to be used as a reference or anything of that nature. Remember, the reason I was given for the layoff was that my skillset no longer matched the requirements of the company.

The other reality-slap in the face came this evening as I was eating dinner and watching TV. There was a segment on ‘next gen’ gaming consoles comparing the XBox360, Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3. And I realized that this holiday season, I wasn’t going to be buying any of the new consoles. (Granted I’m being pessimistic here… I should hope I’ll be working by then!) It was the first reality check that no longer could I buy things just because I wanted them.

On the other hand, I think there’s some good in that, too. In fact, there’s some good in all of this. This is an opportunity to spend…well in theory I could spend the rest of the summer…thinking about what I really want to do with my life.

So all in all, I think Day 2 was ok….